Fear has always been a political sport. From McCarthy’s communists to MAGA’s scapegoats, the playbook is the same
How MAGA Uses Fear Like McCarthy Once Did
Let’s examine this with the precision of a jeweler’s loupe and the irritation of someone watching a circus fire from inside the tent. NCAA President Charles Baker—armed not with slogans but with actual numbers—tells us there are exactly ten transgender athletes competing in all of college sports. Ten. Out of 510,000. That’s 0.00196%—about the odds of being struck by lightning while simultaneously being bitten by a shark.
Ten athletes out of 510,000 are not an existential threat!
And yet, the Republican Party—perennially adept at conjuring existential threats from lint and shadow—has declared this the hill upon which civilization might collapse. A movement that claims to “protect children” could aim its moral artillery at real dangers: poverty, hunger, school shootings, or the climate catastrophe that will define their lives. Instead, they’ve been trained to see ten young athletes—barely enough to field a cricket team—as the heralds of an athletic Armageddon.
This is not politics. It is pantomime politics—rehearsed outrage over something so vanishingly small that it is statistically indistinguishable from nothing. It’s the legislative equivalent of declaring war on garden gnomes because one startled you in a hardware store. And it’s an old trick: McCarthy hunting imaginary communists in every coffee shop; the Vietnam-era “domino theory” predicting global collapse if one small country slipped our grasp. The method never changes: inflate a microscopic threat into a towering menace, then pose as the only bulwark against it.
And the base, dutiful as Pavlov’s dogs, salivates on cue—clutching pearls, snarling into microphones, and voting for the politicians who promise to “protect” them from a danger that, in statistical terms, could be erased by a stiff breeze. It would be comedy if it weren’t so corrosive to reason itself.
The target rotates—transgender athletes today, a woman’s right to choose tomorrow. If not that, it’s vaccines, “murderers and rapists” allegedly swarming the border, sinister trade deals, or whatever ogre the base can be trained to fear next. The aim is distraction: keep the faithful panicked and they’ll never notice the real heist—the slow, deliberate pickpocketing of American democracy.
Bonhoeffer’s Warning on Stupidity vs. Malice
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, awaiting execution for his part in the plot to kill Hitler, knew this pathology well:
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice… Against stupidity we are defenseless.”
He saw how Germans surrendered reason long before they surrendered liberty. They were not coerced into obedience—they were seduced into it. Fed a daily ration of lies, they mistook their own ignorance for moral clarity.
We’re up to our necks in the same swamp—except our tyrants are reality-TV hosts, our propaganda comes with a jingle, and our citizens volunteer for their own lobotomies. The national motto has shifted from “Give me liberty or give me death” to “Don’t bore me with facts.”
Science is dismissed as elitism, expertise as snobbery, and conspiracy theory has become a competitive sport. We have people who believe the Earth is flat, that wind turbines cause cancer, and that a man who lies for amusement is the lone custodian of truth. These are not merely the mistaken—they are the specimens Bonhoeffer described: serenely self-satisfied, impervious to evidence, and one grievance away from violence.
Their idol—a man without character, curiosity, or moral compass—treats them exactly as a pickpocket treats a drunk: with opportunistic contempt. He laughs at them in private, fleeces them in public, and they keep coming back for more. It’s as if Jesus had delivered the Sermon on the Mount, then turned to Judas backstage and muttered, “I can’t believe they swallowed it whole.”
Evil, Bonhoeffer noted, carries the seeds of its own destruction. Stupidity does not. The malicious can be exposed and opposed; the stupid will hand the knife to their assassin and call it patriotism.
We once sent men to the moon, eradicated diseases, and built libraries as cathedrals to the human mind. Now the village idiot is no longer shamed—he is given a podcast, a political office, and an audience.
Ignorance is not accidental here. It is cultivated, monetized, and weaponized. And unless we relearn how to despise it, it will finish the work our enemies only dreamed of starting.
Yes, they are dummies. But they are dummies with megaphones—and worse, dummies with votes. And that is the truly dangerous part.
Why It MatterS
- Fear politics is not new; it’s recycled propaganda.
- The numbers never justify the panic.
- Liberty is lost when fear is sold as protection.
Further Reading
- Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, Nancy MacLean — Reveals how fear-driven politics reshaped U.S. democracy from the inside out. https://civilheresy.com/Democracy in Chains
- Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, Anne Applebaum — Examines how fear and disinformation fracture societies and empower authoritarians. https://civilheresy.com/twilight of democracy lure of authoritarianism
- The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, Tom Nichols — Explores the deliberate cultivation of ignorance and its corrosive impact on democracy. https://civilheresy.com/Death of Expertise
